There wasn't any question about acceptance! We all said we were
delighted, and we meant it. I looked around for a hut or some such
place, or even for a tent, and, seeing nothing of the sort, wondered
where we might be going to eat. I soon found out. The major led the
way underground, into a dugout. This was the mess. It was hard by the
guns, and in a hole that had been dug out, quit literally. Here there
was a certain degree of safety. In these dugouts every phase of the
battery's life except the actual serving of the guns went on.
Officers and men alike ate and slept in them.

They were much snugger within than you might fancy. A lot of the men
had given homelike touches to their habitations. Pictures cut from
the illustrated papers at home, which are such prime favorites with
all the Tommies made up a large part of the decorative scheme.
Pictures of actresses predominated; the Tommies didn't go in for war
pictures. Indeed, there is little disposition to hammer the war home
at you in a dugout. The men don't talk about it or think about, save
as they must; you hear less talk about the war along the front than
you do at home. I heard a story at Vimy Ridge of a Tommy who had come
back to the trenches after seeing Blighty for the first time in
months.

"Hello, Bill," said one of his mates. "Back again, are you? How's
things in Blighty?" "Oh, all right," said Bill.

Then he looked around. He pricked his ears as a shell whined above
him. And he took out his pipe and stuffed it full of tobacco, and
lighted it, and sat back. He sighed in the deepest content as the
smoke began to curl upward.

"Bli'me, Bill--I'd say, to look at you, you was glad to be back
here!" said his mate, astonished.

"Well, I ain't so sorry, and that's a fact," said Bill. "I tell you
how it is, Alf. Back there in Blighty they don't talk about nothing
but this bloody war. I'm fair fed up with it, that I am! I'm glad to
be back here, where I don't have to 'ear about the war every bleedin'
minute!"

That story sounds far fetched to you, perhaps, but it isn't. War talk
is shop talk to the men who are fighting it and winning it, and it is
perfectly true and perfectly reasonable, too, that they like to get
away from it when they can, just as any man likes to get away from
the thought of his business or his work when he isn't at the office
or the factory or the shop.

Captain Godfrey explained to me, as we went into the mess hall for
lunch, that t